


Another New York Times T Magazine Exclusive: The Man Out of Time

by StrawberryLane



Series: A Timeline Reconstructed: Lady Luck and Mister Barnes [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female Steve Rogers, Interviews, Natasha Sam and Tony are mentioned but they do not appear in person, New York Times, New York Times T Magazine, News Media, magazine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 10:57:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8530354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrawberryLane/pseuds/StrawberryLane
Summary: The Winter Soldier’s real name is James Buchanan Barnes and he married Stephanie Barnes (nee Rogers), later known as Lady Luck, on July 11, 1936, a week after her eighteenth birthday. “We just couldn’t wait any longer,” James, who repeatedly tells me to call him Bucky, says as he looks over to his wife of eighty years. She has accompanied her husband to our interview as moral support, insisting on taking a seat a few benches away from us, where she can watch us like a hawk, but we can pretend she’s not actually there. 
—̶ Excerpt from a New York Times T Magazine Exclusive with Bucky Barnes, husband of Lady Luck and the world's longest serving prisoner of war.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The picture was found on google images and text and logo was added by me, but the actual picture is from GQ's May 2016 interview with Sebastian Stan.

                                                                           

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**By Amber Bruckhardt**

At this point in time, everybody knows who the Winter Soldier is. He is the man who was Hydra’s master assassin and number one weapon for over seventy years. He came into the spotlight during a fight in downtown DC with Avengers Lady Luck, Black Widow and the man later revealed to be Sam Wilson (better known as the Falcon) in 2014. Not a lot of people realized the _other_ connection between The Winter Soldier and Lady Luck, though. But it’s there.

The Winter Soldier’s real name is James Buchanan Barnes and he married Stephanie Barnes (nee Rogers), later known as Lady Luck, on July 11 1936, a week after her eighteenth birthday. “We just couldn’t wait any longer,” James, who repeatedly tells me to call him Bucky, says as he looks over to his wife of eighty years. She has accompanied her husband to our interview as moral support, insisting on taking a seat a few benches away from us, where she can watch us like a hawk, but we can pretend she’s not actually there. So far, it’s not really working.

I can’t say I don’t understand her, watching her husband like she does. If I was married to a man that looked like Bucky Barnes, I’d be staring too. I tell Bucky congratulations on being married for so long and he frowns. “Well, in reality it’s only been like, eight years. Ten, if you include these last two years. But I spent most of those hiding from her, so I don’t know if we should. But thanks.”

Let’s give those of you who flunked history class and have been hiding under a rock for the last five years a bit of an update, shall we?

James “Bucky” Barnes, was an American soldier and sniper, active in Lady Luck’s special force unit, The Howling Commandos during the second world war. He fell to his death from a train traveling through the alps in 1944 and was mostly famous for that and for his affair (Barnes was supposedly married) with Lady Luck. The lady herself nosedived her plane, and herself, into the ocean, supposedly dying. Fast forward to 2011, and Lady Luck was found, alive, still looking like she did when she went under. Freaky, right?

Shortly afterward, she joined the Avengers, the band of superheroes who’s been saving the world from everything from aliens to giant robots these last years. In 2012, I interviewed her for a piece that was supposed to be about the aliens in New York and ended up being about something entirely else. Lady Luck dropped quite the bomb; She was Stephanie Barnes, the woman Bucky Barnes was thought to have been married to before meeting Lady Luck.

Fast forward again, this time to 2014. Lady Luck, along with aforementioned Black Widow and Falcon, fight a masked man with a metal arm (The Winter Soldier) in Washington DC and uncover the fact that SHIELD was in fact, HYDRA, a villainous organization that was founded during the second world war and long since thought dead. They also discover that the Winter Soldier is no one other than Stephanie Barnes’ husband, Bucky Barnes.

Back in 1944, after his fall from the train but before he actually died, Barnes, severely injured, was found by the Russians and taken to a Hydra facility, where he was experimented on, and, injected with a similar kind of serum to the one given to his wife a few years earlier. He was exposed to all kinds of torture and brainwashing and the Winter Soldier was born. Hydra, and the Russians, used him as their weapon during covert ops, and he gained a reputation among those in the know for being a ghost because no one could be sure he actually existed. In between missions, the organization would keep him frozen, in a “sort of freezer, really.” something that explains why Barnes looks like he hasn’t aged a day since 1944.

After Lady Luck and her husband, who suffered from amnesia due to repeatedly being electrified by Hydra and therefore didn’t remember his wife, meet again in 2014, a game of cat and mouse begins. “I ran,” Bucky tells me as we sit down on a rickety bench in Central Park, on a sunny day in June 2016. “I couldn’t face her, not with all of the horrible crimes I suddenly remembered having been made to commit. I guess I needed a breather.”

And a breather he got. Lady Luck got sidetracked during her self imposed mission to find her husband, to help the Avengers fight and defeat a giant robot who threatened to take over the world. Embarrassingly enough, the robot itself was made by Tony Stark, an avenger in his own right. They won, but not without a high number of civilian casualties.

“I remember watching that on the news,” Bucky muses, “Thinking to myself ‘What the fuck is this. What the fuck is going on. What is she doing? There’s robots now?'”

What happened in Sovokia, with the Stark built robot, called Ultron, and in Laos, Nigeria (a failed mission during which countless innocent civilians lost their lives), made the governments around the world put their feet down. Something needed to be done. And so the Sovokia Accords (see explanation on p. 24) were introduced. Something that, in turn, lead to the Avengers arguing among themselves in a, somewhat jokingly dubbed by the media, “Civil War.”

During the already heated debate about the Accords, a terrorist wrongly identified as the Winter Soldier bombed the Vienna International Centre, where the Accords were being discussed, making the already frail bonds of friendship between the Avengers snap right off.

”I was as surprised as anyone, finding out that I had apparently bombed a building in Vienna. All I wanted was to reclaim my life,” Bucky says as he sticks out his hand (flesh one, the metal one is carefully hidden beneath a long sleeved shirt and a glove) towards a duckling that has slowly been wandering closer and closer to us since we sat down. ”But then Steph found me, and the war between the Avengers was officially started. That whole thing with Tony was a bit of fuck feast,” Bucky tells me, now petting the duckling. He is, of course, referring to the fact that Tony Stark, along with the rest of the world, found out that his parents’ fatal car crash back in 1991 wasn’t as much of an accident as it was thought to have been, but instead the work of a brainwashed Bucky Barnes. ”The thing that throws me the most, now that I remember it, is that I killed the man who helped make my wife the way she is, the man who cured her, essentially. He helped Stephanie save me and the Commandos from that Hydra facility. I killed someone I had considered a friend, without even realizing who he was.”

After the ”civil war” between the Avengers ended, those who had sided with Lady Luck hid out in Wakanda, under the protection of King T’challa, who also gave Bucky a new metal arm, since the one he used to have had been blasted off by Tony Stark in an attempt to avenge his parents deaths. After a few weeks, they returned to US soil, and Bucky went through a months-long trial for his actions as the Winter Soldier. ”It was a difficult time, for all of us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Steph look so angry and determined and disappointed as she looked then, and I saw her trying to enlist for the army, over five times back in 1940’s.”

The trial ended in Bucky’s favor. ”They declared I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions, considering what Hydra had done to me in order to make me do those things in the first place. So now I am officially the longest held prisoner of war in the world.”

He seems oddly proud of this. ”Well, you know. I’ve got to find some humor in this situation, or I’ll never get through it alive.”

”Steph likes you,” he confides in me, when I tell him it is an honor to have been chosen as the only journalist, and only news outlet, to have gotten a personal interview with the notorious Winter Soldier. All others, including those who covered his trial, have had to make do with vague statements made by Stark Industries and Lady Luck.

I feel _very_ flattered, let me tell you.

I ask him what his future plans are, now that his trial is over and the Avengers are slowly mending their broken relationships; “Team Cap”, — as the Avengers supporting Lady Luck has been nicknamed for their collective affinity to wearing baseball caps — are supposed attend a Tony Stark charity event later this week. He shrugs.

”I’ve got no real plans, other than working on myself, my relationship and to try to atone for what I’ve done. Because no matter how much Stephanie tells me the crimes weren’t my fault, I still feel responsible for them.”

 


End file.
